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2025-06-02
“Graphical excellence is the well-designed presentation of interesting data—a matter of substance, of statistics, and of design…”
Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 1983
“It is that which gives to the view the great number of ideas in the shortest time with the least ink in the smallest space…”
Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 1983
“It is nearly always multivariate…”
Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 1983
“Graphical excellence requires telling the truth about the data…”
Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 1983
Charles Minard’s Napoleon’s March
“[Minard’s classic image] can be described and admired, but there are no compositional principles on how to create that one wonder graphic in a million.””
Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 1983
Instead, Tufte suggests:
We will revisit more of Tufte’s principles throughout the course.
ggplot2ggplot2 is a powerful package for creating data visualizationsgit is a powerful tool for version controlgit is not GitHubgitgitggplot2 syntax, since LLMs really can mostly solve technical visualization problems4
Graduate Summer Institute of Epidemiology and Biostatistics